Poll: Is our star-nosed mole hotter than the NYT's star-nosed mole?

My last two posts have touched on aesthetics-- namely two specimens that paralleled things in our human world that most of us would find aesthetically pleasing. Here I'm going to touch on aesthetics again, but in the opposite direction-- namely a specimen that is ugly! Well, ugly according to the New York Times, at least.

About a month ago, the NYT ran an article about the science of ugliness that examined why we find some animals to be attractive and cute, and others repulsive and ugly. In it, the star-nosed mole, Condylura cristata, was the posterchild for ugly animals. Here's the image of it that they featured in the article:


The scientists who were interviewed explained that we tend to be repelled by the star-nosed mole because the pink nose causes us to identify with it-- that is, flesh color reminds us of a human face-- but at the same time it is not what a human face should look like, which makes us recoil. Here are some tidbits from the article that explain this more fully:

The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.”

As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.

Later in the article Dutton noted that “No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue". I don't know of any blue star-nosed moles, but here at Peabody VZ, we do have a star-nosed mole that is completely brown! YPM MAM 5852 was collected in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1940, and it's brown now because it has been preserved in ethanol, which has caused it to lose its pigmentation. Here are two pics:



So what do you think? Is this brown star-nosed mole as ugly as a live one with all of its pink and fleshy pigment? Or, without the flesh color, is it a bit easier on the eyes as the scientists from the article would predict? Please chime in! I think our museum specimen offers a fun test of their hypothesis.

YPM ICH 7062: More eel-imitating art

This eel, YPM 7062, is a reef dwelling species, Gymnothorax favagineus, and it was collected in the Indian Ocean's Seychelles Islands during the Yale Seychelles Expedition of 1957-58. It reminds me a ring that my best friend wears every once in a while. Here are two pics of the eel:




And here are two pics of the ring:



Certainly the artist who fashioned this ring wasn't directly inspired by this eel (well, maybe he or she was! I'm guessing not, though). But the precision of this convergent aesthetic, I think, is quite extraordinary.

Speaking convergent aesthetics, I think my husband wins the convergent aesthetic contest from my last post. We just found this picture of a steel floor. Pretty much an exact match to the scales of the Synaphobranchus kaupii specimen:

YPM ICH 13045: Art imitating eel scales

I am no artist, but I do remember a technique I learned in a middle school drawing class called cross hatching. This eel, YPM ICH 13045, is a cutthroat eel of species Synaphobranchus kaupii, and was collected on July 29 2002 by Jon Moore at a depth of 1388 meters at Bear Seamount, an underwater volcanic mountain in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New England. Its scales remind me of cross hatching:


Cross hatching is used in drawings to create dimension, depth, and texture. Here are two examples of it that I found using Google image search at this site and this site, respectively:



In a previous post I talked about convergent evolution, which is the phenomenon where similar biological traits and forms evolve in unrelated lineages. A great example of convergent evolution is the wings of birds and bats-- although they both have wings, their wings evolved independently. It is not a trait that they both have through common ancestry.

Cutthroat eels tend to dwell on the slopes of continental shelves, where it might be useful to have scales that create texture to blend in with habitat there (I couldn't find any studies discussing the function of the scales, but this is my hypothesis. If you're wondering if light penetrates at these depths, see the discussion in the comments below). As I mentioned above, artists use cross hatching to create texture in their drawings. These eels have perhaps evolved criss-crossed scales to create texture; humans have developed cross-hatching to create texture. I am going to dub this convergent texture creation! (Presumptuously assuming, of course, that my hypothesis is correct...).

Here are more pictures of the scales, along with a full body shot for scale (although these eels can get much bigger than this).




My husband actually thinks the scales look more like the texture of a common type of steel flooring (pictured below), rather than cross hatching. What do you think?

YPM ICH 23585: A baby porcupinefish!

Last week Twan Leenders, a conservation biologist for the CT Audubon Society and a Peabody curatorial affiliate, deposited a baby porcupinefish for the collection! Here are pics, taken by Twan. The little guy is about the size of a quarter:



Pretty cute, huh? A little boy found it (dead) on the beach of the CT Audubon Coastal Center and brought it to Twan. Twan brought it here, and Greg Watkins-Colwell of our division along with Karsten Hartel of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology identified it.

It's a porcupinefish of the species Chilomycterus schoepfi (common name striped burrfish). Here's what these guys look like as adults (photo from here):


If you think it looks like a pufferfish, you're right. It acts like a pufferfish too-- it can inflate its body to ward off predators, and it's toxic just like a pufferfish. But it turns out it's not actually a pufferfish. It belongs to a very closely related family known as the porcupinefishes (family Diodontidae), as I alluded to earlier in the post.

For more on our new little specimen, the CT Audubon Society has blogged about it in more detail here.

YPM ICH 8403: Electric elephantfish with big brains

So apparently when you've got a long schnoz, intelligence is something that comes along with the territory. Or so it would seem if elephants and elephantfishes were your only two data points. Elephantfishes comprise the family Mormyridae, and they parallel elephants not only in nasal appearance, but in high intelligence as well, with a brain size to body mass ratio equaled only by our own!

Here are two Mormyrids, species Gnathonemus longibarbis, from YPM ICH 8403, collected in 1956 in Uganda's Lake Kyoga:


Why the long proboscis? Mormyrids live in Africa and tend to inhabit murky lakes and swamps; the proboscis is thought to be a touch organ that helps them locate the mud-dwelling invertebrates that they like to feed on. As far as I can tell though, it's not like an elephant's trunk-- elephantfishes can't suck anything into their proboscis since, as I found on our specimens, as there are no openings at the end. All it does is help find food. In fact, the mouth is actually above the proboscis, not below it! Here is a shot where you can see this:


Why such a big brain? To meet the demands of being electric. That's right, they are electric, and their cerebellum is so specialized and large that it even has its own special name, the "mormyrocerebellum". This mormyrocerebellum is the neural center for coordinating their electricity.

You might be thinking about electric eels right now, which use their electricity to stun prey, but Mormyrids actually use their electricity quite differently, in a dizzying number of ways! Because they live in murky lakes and have poor eyesight, they use it for orientation and navigation. The electric field is continuous and envelops them, so when they swim near an object, the field is interrupted and they are alerted to the object's proximity. They also use their electricity for various means of communication, including territorial interactions, species recognition, individual recognition, courtship, and communicating social status. This is possible because the elephantfish can both output and receive very specific electrical signals--signals that vary by only fractions of a millisecond. Most fish rely on visual and other types of signals for communication, but given their turbid habitat, the Mormyrids' unique electrical system works better for them.


Sources:

Helfman, Gene S., B.B. Collette, D.E. Facey, and B.W. Bowen. 2009. The Diversity of Fishes, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken.

Paxton, John R., and W.N. Eschmeyer. 1994. Encyclopedia of Fishes. Academic Press, San Diego.

YPM ICH 7753: A gruesome fish collected by a Prettyman

A few weeks ago I re-curated this gem:


It's the 3 inch-long head of a Hydrolycus scomberoides, a piscivorous (fish eating) fish of the family Cynodontidae from the Amazon. Common names of this species include "vampire fish" and "sabretooth tetra".

This specimen was collected in 1976 from the Orinoco River in Venezuela by a man distinctively named "L. Prettyman, Jr."! Below is the original label. I can't imagine what it must have been like to grow up with a name like that...

Scientists do not step on Hero Shrews

While in general I suppose it's a possibility that a scientist (or anyone for that matter) might step on a hero shrew by accident (or heaven forbid out of malice), the scientists who first discovered the hero shrew's great strength did not have to step on any hero shrews to do so. Nope, it was the savage natives! [yes, cue ironic tone that condemns the attitudes prevalent during colonialism]. Seriously though, all they had to do was talk to the Mangbetu people of the Congo, who were quite knowledgeable about local natural history (and I imagine learned of the Hero Shrew's strength by observation or accident). Taking a cue from a reader, I did some investigating and wanted to clarify this whole matter, lest anyone think that scientists are ruthless hero shrew crushers who systematically stood heavier and heavier men on top of one to test its limits until it squashed.

Evidently, the Mangbetu knew of the hero shrew's strength and brought it to the attention of naturalists Herbert Lang and James Chapin during the American Museum of Natural History Congo Expedition, 1909-1915. Here is Lang's account from his field notes (which can be found in Allen 1917):

"The natives of these regions, especially the Mangbetu, who are well acquainted with the shrew, first called our attention to its abnormally strengthened back-bone by their performances upon captive specimens ... Whenever they have a chance they take great delight in showing to the easily fascinated crowd its extraordinary resistance to weight and pressure. After the usual hubbub of various invocations, a full-grown man weighing some 160 pounds steps barefooted upon the shrew. Steadily trying to balance himself upon one leg, he continues to vociferate several minutes. The poor creature seems certainly to be doomed. But as soon as his tormentor jumps off, the shrew after a few shivering movements tries to escape, none the worse for this made experience and apparently in no need of the wild applause and exhortations of the throng."

So impressed were the Mangbetu with the hero shrew that, in addition to frequently showing it off to visitors, they wore parts of the shrews as talismans, believing them to bestow invincibility. Here are Lang's field notes on the subject:

"These people feel convinced that its charred body or even its heart, when prepared by their medicine-men, transmit truly invincible qualities, if worn as a talisman or taken like a medicine. Perhaps this mystic reputation has often contributed to make of a brave man a real hero, wherefore the Mangbetu gave it a name meaning 'hero shrew.' Those engaging in warfare or setting out upon equally dangerous enterprise such as hunting elephants are anxious to carry along even a fraction of the ashes of this shrew. Though only worn somewhere about their body, they believe that neither spears nor arrows, nor any kind of attack can seriously injure them, much less bear them down. One can easily imagine that by the removal of the inhibitory influence of fear their courage, cunning and cleverness are set free for the best possible acheivements."

Thus both the common name of Scutisorex somereni and our knowledge of its colossal strength come from the Mangbetu people. It turns out that the hero shrew had been described by scientists as a species in 1910--previous to Lang's and Chapin's encounter with the Mangbetu people--but the unique backbone structure had been completely overlooked because it was custom then to only take the skull and skin for scientific study! I wonder how long it would have taken us to learn of the hero shrew's extraordinary backbone had Lang and Chapin not run into the Mangbetu people ...

Here is one more shot of the hero shrew's spine, viewed from above, versus a "normal" shrew of the genus Crocidura. Taken from Allen 1917:



References:

Allen, J.A. 1917. The skeletal characters of Scutisorex (Thomas 1910). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 37, pp. 769 - 784.